Unfair but balanced commentary on tax and budget policy, contemporary U.S. politics and culture, and whatever else happens to come up

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Digging a deeper hole

One good thing to do, if nearly 60 percent of the country has concluded that you are a liar, is to stop lying.

This evidently has not occurred to President Bush, who, in addition to equating dissent with treason (despite an upfront disclaimer), is still making the false claims that (a) everyone in Congress had access to the same intelligence as he did (rather than just the parts the Administration chose to share), and (b) the Administration has been cleared by independent inquiries of slanting the prewar Iraq intelligence info.

The Post article is also kind enough to state: "The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction..."

But that is not the point in dispute, which is whether, in addition to the honest mistake that everyone on all sides made, the Administration also made dishonest mistakes by deliberately hyping what it knew were false particulars.

If I genuinely believe it is cold outside and everyone shares this belief, I am still lying if I falsely claim that a thermometer says it is 14 degrees.

8 comments:

It was worth worrying about whether Iraq was working to get WMD, but once Hans Blix and company were running through Colin Powell's list of suspected locations for such weapons and finding nothing, pushing on toward invasion was really unforgivable.

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About Me

I am the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School. My research mainly emphasizes tax policy, government transfers, budgetary measures, social insurance, and entitlements reform. My most recent books are (1) Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax (2009) and (2) Taxes, Spending, and the U.S. Government's March Toward Bankruptcy (2006). My other books include Do Deficits Matter? (1997), When Rules Change: An Economic and Political Analysis of Transition Relief and Retroactivity (2000), Making Sense of Social Security Reform (2000), Who Should Pay for Medicare? (2004), Taxes, Spending, and the U.S. Government's March Towards Bankruptcy (2006), Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax (2009), and Fixing the U.S. International Tax Rules (forthcoming). I am also the author of a novel, Getting It. I am married with two children (boys aged 16 and 19) as well as four (!) cats. For my wife Pat's quilting blog, see Patwig’s Blog.